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Re: New camera promises to capture your whole life by ams6110 on Friday October 16, 2009 @06:10PM (#886283)
Why don't we have easy life-logging now? I don't get why you'd want to do this. Sorry I just don't get it. Why would you want to record your whole life, especially on a pendant-cam that would be bouncy and pointing at something irrelevant half the time.

If a lot of people would want something like this, I must really be getting old and out of touch.

I guess it might appeal to the types of people who keep diaries or journals now. I'm not one of them, and neither is anyone I know. Do you keep an audio record of your whole life now? That's been feasible for a long time. Why not? What about video would make you start?

Re: New camera promises to capture your whole life by gwern on Friday October 16, 2009 @07:01PM (#886347)
> Why would you want to record your whole life, especially on a pendant-cam that would be bouncy and pointing at something irrelevant half the time.

Family videos are bouncy and pointing at something irrelevant half the time as well.

> Do you keep an audio record of your whole life now? That's been feasible for a long time. Why not? What about video would make you start?

Omni-directional mikes would pick up too much; directional would be inconvenient to aim. Video is vastly easier to navigate, since we think spatially and visually - how do you scroll through an audio recording? With video, you get feedback as to where you are temporally, especially if there's movement from place to place; with audio, you just randomly fastforward hoping to get nearer where you want to hear, if you can even recognize progress towards or away from the clip you want. (An example: I have a video of a boardwalk, versus audio, and I want to look at an encounter. Will it be easier for me to find that encounter if I can look at the video, or if I just have to listen to random ambience & chit-chat?)

Further, video picks up written material, it will pick up gestures and body language of speakers, and, incidentally (and importantly for the hard-of-hearing, like me) makes spoken language much clearer because you can do some lip-reading.

And remember the practical uses thought of for lifelogging; how would an audio recording help you in traffic court? Some background noise, a screech, a honk, and a thud is worthless. An audio recording might pick up your child's first word - but not also his first step, like a video would.